College Is Evil

This is pretty stunning. One often hears wingnuts mocking "elite college professors," etc, but Mark Noonan lets it all hang out here. College, he says, is primarily a way to make people Democrats. It doesn't occur to him that education is a special case of an influence, that it affects the individual's ability to make choices - just that those who do X vote for Y, where he doesn't like Y. Hence, X is evil.

Our liberals, from Obama on down, are pledged to making college more “affordable” - which isn’t the same as “less expensive” and has zero to do with “more effective”. What it means is “making it easier for ever more kids to enter the schools, thus providing an ever increasing pool of money for those bastions of liberal/left orthodoxy, the colleges and universities of the United States”. One only has to consider that people affiliated with the University of California gave $2 million in political donations in 2008, with 93% of that going to the Democrats, to understand that Democrats have a vested interest in making college more “affordable”. The more “affordable” it is, the more election swag they’ll get. Overall, $51 million was donated by people in education in 2008, with 82% of the total going to Democrats. This is a sweet deal, and whether or not kids are getting educated doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. We’re talking money and power here, understand?

In his clarification, rather than stepping back from his mockery of education, he only makes it worse.

Now, don’t get me wrong - college has its purpose. We certainly want our doctors and engineers well educated in their trade before they take a knife to us or design the new bridge - and, on the whole, we get good results from our engineering and medical courses. But outside of those areas where results are very concrete and easily measurable, we’re not really getting all that much.

If Mark Noonan ran a country, he would not educate children beyond becoming "doctors and engineers." Again I say - I wish we could give these knuckleheads their own country and let them see how their ideas work out!

As some exit music, here's a bit more Noonan, listing all the jobs where education is unneeded.

But suppose you are one who doesn’t have a hankering for climbing the bureaucratic ladder? Maybe a person likes constructing things, and so would like to start up a construction business. Perhaps another likes the hustle and bustle of a sales job and so looks into opening up an appliance store. And then there’s the person who has a bit of artistic talent and thus wants make sculptures for people’s gardens. On and on it goes - a whole bunch of things, mostly very useful, for which a college degree would be mostly useless. And therein lies the rub - we’ve got this education system which is a one-size-fits-all-everyone-goes-to-college bit of nonsense. And even in that nonsense it fails miserably given the number of kids who wind up illiterate after spending years in the education system.

Running a business certainly doesn't profit from schooling or anything.